German City to Evacuate as 2-Ton Bomb Is Defused

By

Vanessa Fuhrmans

December 3, 2011

Nearly half the residents of the German city of Koblenz are being forced to leave their homes this weekend after the discovery of a 2-ton, unexploded World War II bomb, marking the biggest bomb-related evacuation in Germany's post-war history.

Massive WWII Bomb Defused

Experts successfully defused a British 1.8-ton bomb and a 275-pound U.S. bomb that had been discovered last month. Harald Tittel/dapd/Associated Press

Some 45,000 residents of the Rhineland city—including those in a jail, two hospitals and several nursing homes and hotels—are under orders to evacuate by Sunday, when a bomb-disposal squad plans to defuse the 10-foot bomb dropped by British fliers, most likely in a 1944 bombing raid. Found lodged in the bed of the ebbing Rhine River earlier this week, the bomb has the explosive potential to create a crater 60 feet wide and 16 feet deep and demolish a city block, authorities said.

Six and a half decades since the end of World War II, undetonated aerial bombs from the war are still routinely discovered across Germany, relics of the Allies' nearly five-year bombing campaign aimed at crippling German industry and infrastructure and withering domestic support for Hitler's war. Roughly 2,000 tons of bombs, artillery shells and other World War II munitions are discovered in Germany every year, officials estimate, by construction workers, amateur diggers or even children at play.

ENLARGE

Firemen in Koblenz, Germany, prepare a temporary dam around a British bomb found in the Rhine River.
European Pressphoto Agency

But in one of the driest Novembers on record, Rhine River levels have dropped dramatically, revealing an unusually large trove of unexploded bombs in its bed. In addition to the massive British bomb, bomb experts on Sunday will also dispose of a 275-pound U.S. bomb and a German smoke grenade found nearby this week. Officials say they expect to discover more devices in coming days.

The British bomb in Koblenz, now covered by just 16 inches of water, is thought to have been dropped in the night of Nov. 6, 1944, when Royal Air Force planes blanketed Koblenz with bombs and destroyed much of the inner city. By the war's end, air raids had destroyed some 80% of the city.

Horst Lenz, the 56-year-old head of the regional bomb-disposal squad tasked with defusing the devices Sunday, said the bomb is the largest among the hundreds of World War II-era bombs he has tackled since beginning his hair-raising career in 1984.

Mr. Lenz added that as unexploded bombs grow older, they are becoming ever more unstable, and increasingly likely to explode, as the elements deteriorate their chemical detonators. Still, he says Sunday's job should be fairly routine.

"There don't appear to be any special challenges to this one," he said by telephone. "It could maybe take an hour or two." As with most bomb-disposal assignments, Mr. Lenz said he isn't nervous ahead of this one. "The shivers always come afterward."

In addition to clearing a 1.1-mile security zone around the bomb, authorities plan to shut down train traffic Sunday along the country's busy Rhine stretch. They have also been building a dam of hundreds of sand bags around the bomb site to pump water out in preparation for the delicate task of defusing the device.

Though the old bombs have seldom come to casualties over the years, three bomb specialists were killed in an explosion last year just before they were about to neutralize a 1,000-pound bomb in the central German town of Göttingen—fueling renewed worries about the unpredictable dangers of the aging bombs.

Mr. Lenz and other German bomb disposal experts said it could be still decades, or even centuries, before nearly all of the tens of thousands of still-unexploded bombs estimated to be buried throughout Germany are discovered.

"Think about it: After 2,000 years, we are still finding the occasional sword from the Roman military campaigns here," he said. Compare that to the nearly 2 million tons of bombs dropped on Germany less than 70 years ago, he added, and "we definitely have a lot more to find."

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